The Ms. Makeover
To call Ms. a Media
Event sounds less invidious than obvious. Isn't that what all journalism is, by
definition, and what even serious activism aspires to nowadays? Most
single-issue magazines can only dream about the eye-catching niche that Gloria
Steinem and her fellow editors carved out for America's first glossy feminist
publication 25 years ago. With the glamorous Steinem at its helm--and
intermittently on its cover-- Ms. was just the promotional vehicle the
feminist movement needed to go mainstream.
But
Inside Ms. , as you might expect of an "authorized" account of the
magazine, prefers to think of it as a Historic Event. Mary Thom is herself a
staff veteran, who arrived as a researcher at the very start and went on to
serve as executive editor under Editor in Chief Robin Morgan in the 1990s. Thom
touts her reliance on "oral histories of many founders and long-time staff
members." It is clear that she aspires to a down-in-the-trenches record of a
pioneering endeavor that, in her opinion, transcended the ordinary boundaries
of journalism. As such, Thom requires unconventional characters, daunting
circumstances, and heroic goals, all of which she does her best to supply.
Hence Gloria Steinem, one among a large cast of
path-breakers struggling to fulfill an unorthodox dream. Hence the many pages
devoted to the uphill battles on the business end. Unsurprisingly, bold
determination prevailed, and a new kind of magazine was born. "Ms. seems
more like a social movement than a national magazine," Thom writes. The offices
were both "a publishing enterprise and a center for activism." Ms.
"represent[ed] a state of mind." Ms. was a "feminist mecca." A flood of
visitors were eagerly greeted--and vetted--as potential recruits to the cause.
Funds flowed out from the coffers of the Ms. Foundation for Women,
giving fledgling feminist projects the boost they needed.
Such an
epic saga of political activism may have been what Thom meant to write, but
soon enough she settles down into the blander form of the press release. Hers
is not the book to read for a serious assessment of the ideas in the many
articles she makes sure to mention by author. (Her former colleagues, she is
well aware, will head straight for the index.) She rehearses the main
criticisms leveled against the magazine: that it was politically conventional,
emphasizing male-dominated electoral politics and skirting controversy; that it
was sentimental about sisterhood, forever holding up individual women as
inspirational role models. But her reply to the critics consists of providing
an exception or two to each of the complaints and then moving swiftly on. She
dutifully describes the big dramas that got Ms. ' editors all riled
up--the crusade for and defeat of the ERA; the smear campaign in 1975 by the
radical Redstockings, who attacked Steinem for work she'd done a decade earlier
on behalf of a liberal cause that had CIA backing; the nationwide women's
conference in Houston in 1977. What may have been the larger philosophical
questions behind these contretemps? Here is Thom's idea of an answer: "Then as
today, feminism was not an ideology set in stone, but rather an adaptable set
of attitudes and beliefs."
And yet, bromidic and blurry though this
public-relations job is, it is in its way not inaccurate. For Steinem never was
an editor of the sharp, analytic variety; she was a repackager. Her aim was not
to subvert the women's magazine but to give it a makeover, to translate
feminism into something familiar to the middle class. Go back and reread the
Ms. of the 1970s, and you rediscover how psychological how-to-ism for
women at home became consciousness-raising for women newly out in the world.
Confessional narrative became first-person testimonial about the choices and
changes in women's lives. In the coping-with-children department, the message
changed from advice to mothers on, say, avoiding "martyr complexes," to advice
on lobbying for child care and avoiding gender stereotypes with sons and
daughters. Soft-focus messages about sexuality--the importance of pleasing your
man--became pointed discussion of abortion rights and the myth of the vaginal
orgasm.
By the
1980s the positions had grown predictable ( Ms. was pro-abortion, pro-day
care, pro-ERA, pro-welfare rights, pro-clitoral orgasm). But it is no small
tribute to Ms. that most of the issues it raised over the years are
still around. Ms. was among the first women's magazines to run pieces
about sexual harassment, spousal abuse, breast implants, the economic impact of
divorce--all based on real reporting. The formula was not original and didn't
pretend to be--"soft" personal stories, plus "hard" facts, with some
prescriptions for action. It was service journalism, and its depth and quality
were uneven, as it generally is with service journalism. Ms. also relied
a great deal on book excerpts, hardly a sign of bold editorial
entrepreneurship. As for Ms. ' political coverage, crusades heavy on
symbolism preoccupied the staff through the 1970s (the ERA, the Houston
conference). If the magazine followed electoral politics a little doggedly, it
participated in gestural politics a little overenthusiastically. In "Cracking
the Women's Movement Protection Game" in 1978, a staff writer was honest enough
to acknowledge the journalistic--and political--pitfalls of such boosterism.
(She had puffed pro-ERA forces although they were in complete disarray.)
Ms.' radical critics were right. It was not in the business
of making sustained ideological arguments or issuing eccentric polemics. Few
distinctive writers emerged from the magazine, though over the years many
contributed to it. From the choice of name onward, Ms. ' real specialty
was promotion--above all of a usable, salable symbolism. It probably didn't
hurt this larger endeavor that fellow founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin,
the author of How to Make It in a Man's World (1970), had a career as a
high-powered publicist behind her. But it was Steinem's inspirational role at
Ms. that was the model for Ms. ' role with its readers. She was
not a theorist. She was an icon, a catalyst, plugged in to American women via
the lecture circuit, and to establishment men, such as boyfriends Mike Nichols
and Mortimer Zuckerman, via the social circuit.
It's
fitting, then, that Thom perks up whenever she's describing a party, a gala, a
television show, a promotional tour. This was the true Ms. "state of
mind," and there were many such events to boast about. The premier issue in the
spring of 1972 got a plug from The David Frost Show , on which Steinem
and others appeared. Then there was a big party at the New York Public Library
to celebrate. The next year "the magazine's own birthday ... was the occasion
of larger gatherings, several of them aboard a chartered Circle Line boat."
"Everything we did," one member of the staff recalled, "got a tremendous amount
of attention." It would all sound narcissistically frivolous were it not so
earnest. And so ineffective financially; the magazine was all but broke from
the start, and stayed that way.
In the 1980s, "The New Ms. ," which had
been granted not-for-profit educational status, launched a campus issue to
attract younger readers, but a hectically busy Steinem was devoting less
editorial energy to the magazine, and it showed. (You can sense a magazine's
desperation when it tries to generate hoopla on both its 10 th and
15 th anniversaries.) In the 1990s, after being sold and resold,
Ms. lost its spark, but it still carries on. Its covers are as flashy as
ever, though an arid cleanliness reigns within; it resembles nothing so much as
an alumnae magazine. ( Ms. has been ad-free since 1990.) Inside the
current issue you will find, what else, an excerpt from Inside Ms . On
this 25 th anniversary, there is no gala. Instead, there's a book
that reads like a genteel obituary.
